1. Field of the Invention
Aspects of the present invention relate generally to wireless communication techniques, and more particularly to a system and method of beamforming that select candidate vectors to construct a beamforming matrix.
2. Description of Related Art
Recently, the wireless communication industry has demonstrated an increasing interest in beamforming techniques for use in connection with multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) systems. For example, MIMO beamforming systems have been considered in standards promulgated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), most notably the IEEE 802.11n standard for wireless local area networks (WLANs). One advantage of beamforming methodologies is that they can increase the data rate between networked devices without the attendant increase in transmit power or bandwidth that would be necessary to achieve a similar data rate in MIMO systems without beamforming.
One relatively popular beamforming approach uses singular value decomposition (SVD) techniques. However, this method requires a lot of feedback information (i.e., signal information transmitted from the receive device back to the beamforming transmit device). Conventional SVD beamforming also introduces transmit power fluctuations among antennae; thus, traditional beamforming strategies may not efficiently satisfy a per-antenna transmit power constraint.
Therefore, it may be desirable in some instances to provide a beamforming technique that requires significantly less feedback information than the SVD beamforming technique; additionally, it may be desirable to provide a beamforming strategy that does not require an exhaustive search for every element of a beamforming matrix.